


Spun away all her sorrow

by wastrelwoods



Series: high fantasy twinfic!! [1]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Amnesia, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Memory Alteration, Near Death Experiences, Team as Family, Temporary Character Death, Vex'ahlia (Critical Role)-centric, and a couple o post-death experiences, because its what she DESERVES honey, grand mistress of the grey hunt...ilu bitch...i aint gonna never stop loving u...bitch, just...twins fic, taz balance au. listen let me explain i
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-12
Updated: 2019-08-12
Packaged: 2020-08-19 17:36:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20213653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wastrelwoods/pseuds/wastrelwoods
Summary: Vex’ahlia has been on her own as long as she can remember.*A canon-divergent AU. Vex can't remember ever having a brother, but she does have a shadow.





	Spun away all her sorrow

**Author's Note:**

> the thing is. i love critical role and i love the adventure zone? and this is part one of sort of a...genre swap? a fusion? because there are magical conventions and storytelling styles unique to each game that i REALLY wanted to see used in the other for a lark. also both of these parties have a pair of codependent identical elf twins...and i GOTTA play in that space 
> 
> title taken from jenny of oldstones! that's right im putting everything into my fantasy melting pot and stirring wildly

“Who did you lose?” Keyleth asks, quietly, in the smoldering ruins of Greyskull Keep. 

Vex’ahlia falters mid-step, knees buckling, and clutches a roll of bandages tight to her chest. 

The druid flushes, and looks away. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have--”

“No,” Vex says, softer than she’s ever heard her speak in the handful of years they’ve fought side by side. “It’s perfectly fine, darling. I only…”

She clears her throat, straightens her spine and stands like a stone tower in a storm. Guarded against the buffeting winds. If she’s blinking tears from her eyes, Keyleth can’t see them with her back turned. 

Finally, she turns back again, seats herself gently beside Keyleth on the wreckage and pastes on a cold, flat smile. “My mother,” she answers, stiffly. “Elaina. A dragon razed the whole village to ash. I was away.” 

Keyleth’s throat feels tight. “Oh,” she breathes. “Oh.” 

“How did you know?” Vex picks at the layer of soot on her knuckles. 

“You, uh.” Keyleth swallows. “Get this look, sometimes, after a long fight. Like you’re looking around for someone who’s not there. You just seem lonely, you know?” 

Vex’s lips are pressed in a thin line. She doesn’t speak.

“Yeah.” Keyleth tucks a curl behind her ear, her mother’s crown heavy on her head. “Uh, it. Reminds me a little of Percy, I guess. That’s why I wondered.” 

Vex glances across the room at the man in question, pacing to and fro, like he’s waiting for an excuse to bolt. His face is drawn and his eyes are miles away. The ranger musters up a tired smile. “I suppose I see what you mean, darling,” she murmurs, turns her face toward Keyleth and takes her hand. “I’m going to kill that fucking dragon, you know,” she announces, suddenly. 

Keyleth pats her hand, trying not to look worried. “Oh,” she says. “Okay, then.” 

*

Vex’ahlia has been on her own as long as she can remember. 

She doesn’t allow it to get under her skin, much. Not enough to show. A lifetime of foraging and fighting and bartering for every scrap is difficult to conceal, but she’s practiced. She has a very pretty face. Sharp eyes. A laugh like tinkling bells. A gnawing loneliness in the pit of her stomach, but nobody has to know about that. 

And besides, she hasn’t been alone, really and truly alone, for a long time now. She has Trinket, her darling boy. She even has a proper fortress to call home, or did for a little while. She has a ragtag group of mercenaries who love more fiercely than anyone she has ever known. 

Vex doesn’t want to call Vox Machina her family. She’s gone so long without one she isn’t sure she even remembers the meaning of the word. But she couldn’t leave them if she tried, not faced with the staggering emptiness of _before_. And perhaps that amounts to the same thing, in the end. 

Not a family, then. But a shelter from the storm.

There are times, sitting over a campfire or around a banquet table, when one of them will turn to her and say her name a little too quickly, and mar the word in their mouths, and it fills her with a strange, desperate coldness. A sudden pang in her chest, like half her heart has stopped beating. 

It’s a silly thing to be bothered about. A name that isn’t hers. 

Vex tries not to think on it. She climbs the tallest tree she can find, and notches an arrow, and clears her head. Listens to the snap of the bowstring. 

*

Percy reaches for the vestige without hesitating, and the surface burns the tips of his fingers, like the wrought steel and leather is coated in acid or ice. He pulls his hand back, wincing and feeling like an proper idiot. Flinches away just in time to see the gust of dark smoke erupt from the cracks in the armor. A sprung trap. A pall of death. 

“Damn!” he swears, stumbling back, damn, damn--

And turns to shield his face--

And sees Vex’ahlia collapse, flat on her back on the stone, head half propped against the side of the coffin, her dark eyes empty and lifeless. 

A part of Percy’s brain, some last vestige of the darkness he harbored so long in his his head, wonders why he’s surprised. This was bound to happen eventually, he thinks, and hates himself for thinking it. 

He sinks down on the stone beside her, and belatedly thinks to call for the others. “Help,” he manages, hoarsely. His voice carries easily in the small chamber. Tomb, really. 

Zahra rushes over first, and Scanlan and Keyleth with matching expressions of dumb horror, and Grog searching to and fro for an invisible enemy that has already come and gone while his back was turned. Nothing but Percy and his reckless foolishness. 

“Kash,” Zahra begs, running her claws through Vex’s tangled braid, resting her head in her lap. “Kash, please, bring her back.” 

The cleric gapes, looking around the stricken party and out into the darkness at something only he can see. “Zee, it’s not safe,” he pleads, voice cracking. “What if She hears, huh? What if She answers?” 

They argue, back and forth, wasting time. The words are hollow in Percy’s ears. His attention is rapt on Vex’ahlia’s face, and her glassy, open eyes. 

“Just do it!” Scanlan snaps, and Kashaw looks to him with a glare. But before he can answer there’s another gust of that strange darkness, billowing all around them in a shroud of dust and feathers. Percy doesn’t see well in the dark. He might be the only member of the party with that hindrance, but just for a moment, he thinks he can see another Vex looking back at him from the midst of the shifting shadows. 

And then, in the blink of an eye, the vision ends, and Vex’ahlia gasps, bolting upright. Alive, or a very convincing semblance of it. 

Vox Machina look to her with matching expressions of disbelief, and Vex offers them an uneasy smile and a nervous laugh. “Well,” she breathes. “That was close, hey?” 

*

In the weeks that follow, Vex dreams of the oak tree behind her mother’s cottage, with its strong boughs and green leaves. She dreams herself climbing it, scraped knees and bare feet, and she dreams a boy with her face is climbing beside her. 

She dreams of leaving Syngorn in the night, shoving silver pieces and stolen jewelry and fine silk scarves into a bag, tucking a dull letter opener into her shoe. She dreams a boy with her face beside her all the way, a hand held tight in her own as they slipped through the shadowed streets and out the gates into the wide world. 

In her sleep, she sees a dozen years spent wandering the roads, hunting in the Bramblewood, bartering her last coins for a room in Kymal while the man with her face took to the streets to fill the purse back up again.

Vex dreams of the room in Stilben with the rotting walls where she spent half a winter waiting for a fever to break, shivering and sweating and too weak even to open her eyes when she heard the man who never left her side weeping and begging her to stay alive. 

“Take me,” she dreams she heard him swear, voice so raw the words were more breath than sound, “Spare her, and you can take me instead. That’s a promise, you raven bitch.” 

Vex dreams the morning the fever broke, how she packed her things and walked from the empty room straight out of the tavern, not stopping until she’d reached the edge of the town and disappeared beyond the treeline. Alone as she’d always been. 

And Vex wakes with a raven feather on her pillow. 

She sits on the edge of her bed with her feet bare to the morning chill and turns it over in her calloused hands. She remembers dreaming something wonderful and sad, but the memory is fleeting. Gone but for the warmth in her chest, like sitting in front of a blazing hearth on a winter day. 

She ties the feather into her braid, humming an old song with no words. 

When Pike asks, she’ll lie and say it must have gotten caught in her cloak after a hunt and fallen off in the night. 

When Keyleth asks again, more insistently, she’ll lie and say she plucked it from the deathwalker’s ward herself. 

By the end of the week, all the feathers in her braid are a deep, iridescent black, and she catches herself smiling softly without quite knowing why.

*

A small, cruel smile splits Saundor’s face. His yellow eyes are dripping pitch and his teeth are thorns, catching on his tongue when he speaks and speckling his lips with blood. “So many of you come here,” he drones. “All for the sake of one who walks alone.” 

His sharp stare hollows Vex out from the inside, bores deep into her chest and draws her heart out for the rest to see. “Sweet, broken Vex’ahlia,” the archfey croons, and she can’t hold back a flinch, steps back until a tree root brushes her foot. 

His words make her skin itch and her stomach twist, extolling her callousness and greed, calling her cold and selfish in his soft, poisonous whisper. “I see so much of myself in you,” Saundor says, reaching out to her with hands dripping black mud.

“Don’t touch me.” One of the others makes to move in front of her, shielding, but Vex raises a hand. “You know what we’re looking for,” she tells him, voice shaking. 

“Better than you know yourself,” Saundor simpers. “You’re lost, child. You don’t even know what you’re missing, do you? You’ve gotten so good at hiding it, but I see through you. I see your _heart_, and it is half dead.” 

Keyleth makes a sharp, agonized noise. Beside her Percy is stonefaced, but his hand rests firmly on the gun at his belt. Vex doesn’t look at them. Her eyes are on the archfey. 

“Lonely little girl….” Saundor smiles. “I can help you,” he offers. “I have seen many things. I can grant many gifts.”

“I don’t want anything from you.” She stands her ground. “Except that bow.” 

He frowns, and the pitch running down his cheek drips from his chin. “I only want you to understand,” he croaks. “We’re the same. We both have been left behind. Betrayed. _Abandoned_.” 

When Vex doesn’t reply, he steps forward again, tilting his head, staring her full in the face with his eerie glowing eyes. “He left you alone,” Saundor repeats, in a hiss. “Vax’ildan.”

She pauses, for a moment, anger subsiding to give way to pure confusion. “Who?” 

*

When the shadows rush away from Percy’s spirit, and leave his soul battered and bloodied but whole as it ever was, floating through the shallows of the Astral Sea, he finds the other Vex again. 

“De Rolo.” His face is all but shrouded in his hood, but when he leans closer Percy can see the eyes are a familiar warm brown. His hair is dark like hers, but worn loose, framing sharp, lean features contorted into a grimace. “I don’t like you, you know.” 

Percy can’t claim to know the stranger’s reasons, but he presumes that it’s only fair, considering his track record. He groans faintly in accord from where he lies, drifting on the surface of the water. 

The other Vex crouches, and prods at his astral form curiously. Percy winces in pain, and he looks penitent for an instant. Then he frowns. “You hurt my sister,” he accuses, matter-of-factly. 

Verbal communication is somewhat beyond him in this moment, but Percy cannot say he’s surprised how quickly his soul is being shuffled from one eternal judgement to the next, post-mortem. Perhaps it will be the nine hells, after this. He’s overdue for a bit of flaying. _Vex’ahlia?_ Percy musters the energy to ask, more thought than speech. 

The phantom raises an eyebrow, as if deeming the question ridiculous. “She’s fond of you,” comes his next accusation. 

_I’m fond of her_ he thinks, before he can stop himself, and feels his whole spirit prickle with embarrassment. _Sorry, I’ll--_

“She _loves_ you, I mean,” he says, softness and sadness in his face. “So I’m trying to like you, Freddie. And I might even forgive you,” he adds, “On two conditions.”

Percy awaits these in careful silence, still a little taken aback by this abrupt declaration of love. When the other Vex senses he isn’t going to reply, and takes it for agreement, he sits, folding his legs underneath himself, feathered cloak trailing behind him like wings. “Don’t do it again,” he says, voice like razor wire. “Ever. That’s the first condition.” 

Percy’s first instinct is to protest that this shouldn’t be a problem, seeing as he’s already dead, but foresight wins out for the first time in his un-life, and he bites his tongue. _What’s the second?_ he croaks. 

The other Vex stands, and offers a hand to pull Percy to his feet. Percy comes stumbling, upright by degrees, and stands there swaying unsteadily with his feet in the surf. The phantom Vex smiles, pats him firmly on the shoulder, and then rears back and socks him in the eye. 

Percy comes back to his body with a jolt, ushered into his second chance at life with a rapidly purpling shiner, determined to do a little better this go-around. 

*

Pike’s holed up in her usual room in the mansion when she hears a knock at the door. The front door, not whatever secret passage Scanlan dreamed up to connect their chambers, the one Pike always shifts one of the dressers to block off. He’s a good man, but he’s not a polite one, and Pike needs her sleep. 

It’s been a long day. Battling a goristro and a white dragon all at once, worrying every second about whether Raishan might turn on them as well, and almost freezing to death on top of that was pretty tough--

Anyway, she’s only half asleep now, and the knocking on the door is followed up by a timid and slightly slurred, “Pike?”, and then the muffled grunting of a bear. 

“Just a minute!” Pike calls, tugging on a robe. Vex is leaning half against the doorframe when she opens it, holding one bottle of wine and and clearly just finished emptying another. Trinket noses under her arm to give Pike an enthusiastic, slobbery kiss on the cheek. 

Vex glances over her shoulder at the bedroom with its satin sheets and gauzy curtains, and whistles. “Scanlan’s not afraid to play favorites,” she jokes, and holds up the bottle of wine as a peace offering. “Sorry, darling, did I wake you?”

Pike blinks sleepily, and lies, “No! No, not at all, come on in.” 

Vex sits on the edge of the bed for lack of a better option, and almost immediately Trinket paws over and rests his enormous head in her lap. She laughs and concedes to scratch him behind the ears. 

Pike watches her carefully, perched beside her, holding the bottle a little awkwardly. “What, uh...where did you pick this up?”

“Oh, it’s one of Scanlan’s,” Vex says glibly. “Probably made of chicken.”

“Ah.” She sniffs it cautiously before taking a swig. 

Vex lapses into silence for a moment, and takes a deep breath. “Pike?”

She peers at the ranger over the top of the bottle, and tries to look encouraging instead of exhausted. “What do you need, Vex?”

“I think I forgot something,” she answers, slurring, picking at her nails nervously. “Something important. Big.” 

Pike squints at her. “Like what?”

“Like...I don’t know.” Her face is contorted with worry. “I don’t know, I just saw...when we got back from the Feywild? How Percy and Grog...didn’t know anything was wrong, but we knew, because things didn’t add up, and I--” She grasps two handfuls of Trinket’s fur and bites hard at her lip. “It’s probably nothing. Gods, it’s stupid of me to even _ask_\--”

“It’s not stupid!” Pike insists, sitting on her knees on the mattress. “It’s not! You’re a crazy good hunter, Vex, you’re the most perceptive person I’ve ever met. If you feel like something’s wrong, then I think...I think you should trust your instincts.” 

Vex sniffs, looking drunk and miserable. Pike heaves herself off the bed, darting over to her armor, returning with her holy symbol and her pouch of diamond dust. 

“I think I might be able to...do what I did before,” she offers. “Try to restore your memory, I mean. It might help! You never know.”

Vex purses her lips. “What if it doesn’t?” 

Pike scoffs. “Well, then we’ll get some rest and try again tomorrow, and that’s that.” 

Vex smiles a small, slightly shaky smile, and takes a long pull from the wine bottle. “Alright.”

Pike climbs up beside her again and reaches out, hands on her temples, brushing aside her long braid and the raven feathers tucked behind her ear. She closes her eyes. Reaches out for the golden, guiding light where she draws her strength, and pours that light into the woman in front of her. 

She pulls her hands away, gently, searching Vex’s face. The ranger looks back at her, blinking. “Anything?”

Vex shakes her head, brow furrowed, and then goes utterly still. Her face twists with an emotion Pike has never seen before, and she slumps suddenly forward into the gnome’s arms, quivering all over.

“Vex!”

“I forgot,” she announces, dizzily, muffled into Pike’s shoulder. “I forgot my fucking _brother_.”

*

Keyleth knows how to find her by now. They all move in patterns, predictable and easy patterns, in the moments between battles. Percy retreats to a workshop, Grog and Scanlan find a bar or a brothel, Pike joins them there if no temple can be found, and Vex finds the sky. 

Keyleth pries open the door to the upper fort battlements. Vex is sitting with her feet dangling over the side, staring off into the sunset framed by the peaks of the Cliffkeep Mountains. She doesn’t look like she’s slept.

“Vex,” she says, hesitant. The ranger glances back at her with red-rimmed eyes. “Uh.” 

She seems to shake herself out of it, pasting on a brave face, but she looks tired. “Keyleth, darling, come and sit!”

Keyleth does, and purses her lips, and brushes her fingers across Vex’s shoulder, tempted to cast a healing spell. But this wound is too deep beneath the skin for her to mend with magic. “Vex, we’re travelling to the fire plane tomorrow.” She holds her breath. “You need to rest.” 

The ranger smiles thinly. “Course, dear.” Not listening. 

Keyleth tries not to look too downcast, and shifts closer, leaning against her side. It’s a difficult thing, to lose someone you love. Especially when they leave so many questions behind. And the hope, Keyleth thinks. The last fragment of uncertainty. That’s the worst part. 

“Can you scry?” Vex whispers. “For him?” 

Keyleth feels like she’s been petrified. Her tongue is solid rock, and she can’t find the words to reply. 

Vex turns to face her. “Kiki, please,” she begs. “I have to know.” 

Keyleth knows better than most that she’s right. 

She sighs, reaches into her bag to pull out her focus, feels the smooth glass under her fingers. 

“He looks like me,” Vex says, clutching at her arm. “Scrawnier. A little scar on his chin from falling out of a tree. And he wears beads in his hair, these little glass beads all in a strand.” Her eyes are bright with unshed tears. 

Keyleth nods, mutely, holding her breath again, and pictures it. Tries her hardest. Stares into the glass and concentrates until she feels the tingle of the spell taking hold. 

Vex is still clutching tight to her arm, and Keyleth sees the same thing she sees every time she reaches out to find her mother, always hoping that this time, something will turn out differently. Only darkness, and silence, and absence. 

The spell ends, and Keyleth shuts her eyes. 

Vex must read it in her face, because she lets go Keyleth’s arm, and climbs to her feet. 

Keyleth lets the focus fall into her lap. “It doesn’t have to mean--” she begins. “Vax might not be...on this plane, or he might be warded, or--”

Vex laughs, and her laugh is thick with tears. Her fingers worry at the raven feathers woven into her braid. “Thank you,” she says. “For trying.” 

*

The sky is on fire, and Daxio is under attack, and Vox Machina is not prepared for it. Weeks now, they have been pushing and planning and hoping for a miracle to let them take the final fight to Thordak on their own terms. Vestiges in hand, allies at their backs, as ready as anyone can ever be to dive straight into the lion’s mouth. 

But the best laid plans turn to ash in your hands when you dance with dragons. 

Vex takes her shot, grips tight the handle of her broom and takes a swan dive out of the path of a swinging maul, the adrenaline forcing a wild burst of laughter from her throat. As she arcs gracefully under the fire giant’s arm, Grog grins up at her, foaming at the mouth, and swings a fist at the back of one of the giant’s feet. She meets a purple spectral hand coming the other way, and glances down to see Scanlan dancing madly around just below her, a flute in one hand and a handbook of dirty limericks open in the other. 

The giant general ought to take a swipe at Grog. He’s the biggest target, after all, and another blow like that has never failed to bring an enemy to their knees. She’ll know who the biggest danger is. Vex notches another arrow, breathes through it, releases. 

Overhead, a wyvern shrieks, and there’s a resounding boom across the battlefield as Percy sends a musket ball tearing through its wing. 

Vex looks to him, and doesn’t see the great maul swinging for her instead. 

It clips the back of her broom before it slams into her side, and she’s already falling by the time she knows she’s been struck. Ribs groan under the force of the blow, and Vex can’t hold back a shout of pain and shock as she topples out of the sky, broom tethered to her ankle.

She meets the ground with an agonizing thud she can feel in her teeth, one shoulder wrenched out of alignment with the jarring collision for the second time in as many days. Vex groans, and rolls onto her back in time to watch the giant’s boot come down on her ribs, pinning her to the ground. 

“Fuck!” Scanlan shouts, the first to see her fall. “Vex!” 

Vex has looked death in the face before. This giant’s snarling face above her is _nothing_, armor streaked with soot, eyes glowing with tongues of blue flame. She fumbles for her bow though she knows she won’t have time to fire another shot. Her heart thumps frantically, fruitlessly against her ribcage. She grits her teeth and thinks about fresh snow blanketing a forest in quiet. About Percy’s pale hand in her hand, and the soft smile on his lips when he leaned in to kiss her. 

And then, as the giant raises her maul to the flame-torn sky, something strange happens. 

Keyleth is the first to see it, the place where the shimmering veil of reality tears apart with a burst of black smoke. She tastes the bitter tingle of aconite on the air as something slips just past her ear. A low, buzzing sound like a whisper. 

Pike sees the dagger carving through the air, but not the one who threw it. It flies straight and true, with dizzying speed and accuracy, burying itself to the hilt in the giant’s neck, between the plate of her armor and the base of her skull. 

Pulling his fist back for another blow, Grog is the first to see, through rage-dulled eyes, the figure that emerges from the ether, perched on the giant’s shoulder with one hand curled around the hilt of the dagger, tugging it out with a spray of dark mist too black to be blood. 

All of them see the giant stagger back and fall, sinking by slow degrees like a cliff crumbling gradually into the sea. All of Vox Machina look on, wide-eyed, disbelieving, at the pair of iridescent dark wings that unfurl from the strange figure’s back like a mantle, and see the dagger twirl between his fingers and change, so that between one breath and the next the stranger is standing, alighting from the back of the toppled giant, and brandishing a scythe with a curving blade as cold as moonlight on water, tipped like a raven’s beak. 

And we see a glimpse of the past--

*

A long time ago, a thief knelt on the rotting wooden floor of a cheap room in a Stilben inn, and prayed the first prayer of his life. 

Five raven feathers, shakily arranged in a circle. A dagger used this morning to cut purses from belts, drawn across the pad of his thumb. Red blood and shallow, frightened breaths. 

“Take me,” he gasps, turns back to the pallid figure in the bed behind him, shivering and moaning in her sleep, cheeks flushed with fever. His empty stomach is tied in knots with fear, despair, grief, a burning anger roiling in his gut at all that the world has taken from him, and all that it tries to steal away now. A home, a people, a family, and now his very _heart_. “Spare her, and you can take me instead. That’s a promise, you raven bitch.” 

Red blood dripping down past his knuckle. Winter’s chill in the air, a sharp and bitter draught of cold through a crack in the dusty windowpane. Hunger and cold and death creeping in closer with every breath. 

Vax screws his eyes shut, and breathes in. Holds the air in his lungs until it goes sour and stale.

Feels his heart stutter, seize, stop cold. 

Looks up into the face of Death. 

Behind Her porcelain mask, the Raven Queen’s eyes are dark and piercing. She reaches out, holds him cupped in one hand, curls Her colorless lips into a frozen smile. “Little bird,” She croons, in a voice like the howl of winter winds. “I did not expect you so soon.” 

*

“You bend the threads of destiny around you,” She tells him, like She’s commenting on the weather. “Weaving your own path. Even I cannot see what you will make of it. My Fate-Touched.” 

Vax is twenty, an underfed beggar and a cutpurse, and he tries to hold himself like a man who knows how to speak to a goddess, wavering in Her grip. “I can be useful,” he says, shakily. “To you. If you like. Whatever you need from me, I’ll do it.” 

She cocks her head to the side, examining him thoroughly. “An interesting proposition.” Her hair falls around Her mask like a dark river. Her eyes glint brighter. “You would remain at my side. My emissary.”

“Just let me keep her safe,” he pleads, desperation driving him forward.

The Raven Queen stares, puzzled. “Death is the natural end of all things. Do not seek to alter that balance, Vax’ildan Vessar.”

“That’s not my name,” he says, tightly. “And I’m telling you, you can have me, as long as you want, if you let my sister live, yeah? Not forever. Just...just a little while longer. She’s not _supposed_ to die here. I know it.” 

She laughs, and it sounds like splintering bone. Her hand curls around Vax tighter. “If this is the way you choose to bend the threads,” She acquiesces. “Then it is fated.”

Vax shudders with relief and terror mixed in equal measure. 

After a moment, the goddess speaks again. “Vex’ahlia. She will try to take you back from me, if she knows I have you.” 

Vax is silent, the certainty burning heavy in the back of his throat. She doesn’t speak it like a question, but like a prophecy. And he knows his sister. The stubbornest, bravest hunter he’s ever met. She would break the world to find him. Like he would die to protect her, without hesitation. Without even a thought. 

He swallows. “Then I suppose...she can’t know about it.” 

*

\--and snap back, again, to the present. The figure with the scythe lifts one bloodstained hand to lower his hood, and his face comes clearly into view for the first time. Brown skin, lean features, long hair with a strand of glass beads woven in behind one pointed ear. The tips of his wings scrape the ground. Dark eyes take in the scene, and then find Vex’ahlia, sprawled on the ground but pushed up onto one elbow, staring like she’s seen a ghost. 

“Who the hell are you?” Grog grumbles, still bleary with rage, clearly off-put by having his kill stolen out from under him. 

“Vax!” Keyleth blurts, reforming from her Wild Shape with an uncontrolled burst of excitement of having solved a mystery. “Uh, hello, sorry, I’m K--”

“Hold on,” An affronted Scanlan interrupts her to turn and shout, indignant, in the face of their still-stunned ranger, “Your brother is the fucking _grim reaper_?”

*

Jury’s still out on whether he’s a half-elf or some kind of undead construct beyond the needs of this mortal realm wearing the guise of one, but Vax’ildan can’t hold his liquor for shit. Pike raises another round to the newest member of their party, and Vox Machina cheer and throw back their ale like it’s their last night on earth. And hell, it probably will be. 

Tomorrow they kill Thordak.

There’s foam in Grog’s beard when he grabs Pike and lifts her over his head, cheering. She whoops out her best battle-cry, and tries not to feel Scanlan’s conspicuous absence, whispering with Jarrett in the corner about some secret project of his. 

Both she and Grog take to Vax immediately, Pike because she’s missed having a friend who really understands devotion to a goddess, and Grog because Vax has already displayed a mischievous streak on par with their bard, stacking trays and glasses a full three layers tall on the head of one of the bar’s other patrons, a bit too deep in their cups. 

Grog wanders off to pick a fight before the evening is out, and Pike lingers a little longer, watching Vex lean on her shadow of a brother like the two of them are joined at the hip. Vax’s hand twines in hers, and neither can quite keep the joy at being reunited from showing on their faces. 

Vex’s eyes are glassy with tears, and Pike turns away when she hears her whisper, low and soft, “I’m a baroness, you know.” 

A quiet laugh is startled out of Vax. “Moving up in the world, Stubby?” 

“Always, darling,” Vex says, “Killing dragons, winning titles. Of course I haven’t been adopted by a _goddess_, yet, but you can’t have it all--” 

Vax takes her face in his hands, leans in closer, forehead resting on her collarbone. “M’sorry I left.” 

Vex cards her fingers through his long hair, and doesn’t cry, but it’s a close thing. “I think I missed you before I ever knew you were gone,” she says, suddenly exhausted. “Don’t know how to do anything without you.” 

“You do,” Vax replies, muffled. “Course you do, look at you. Big strong adventurer. Dragonslayer. _Nobility_.”

Pike hears the distinct sound of a sniffle, and buries her nose in the bottom of her ale to avoid being caught out. 

“Are you gonna stay?” Vex says, a little watery. 

“Not forever,” Vax admits, resting his head on her shoulder. “Work to do. But I’ll come back. Always. Long as I can.” 

Vex holds him tighter. “I’ll hold you to that, darling.”


End file.
